Search engines play important roles for supporting user interactions with the Internet. Search engines often act as a “gateway” to the Internet for many users, who use them to locate information of interest as a first resource. They are practically indispensable for negotiating the many thousands of web pages that form the World Wide Web.
Many users typically review only the first page or first few pages of search results that are provided by a search engine. For this reason, owners of web sites alter their web pages to increase their rank, whether by making the pages more “friendly” to spiders or by altering content, layout, tags and so forth. This process of changing a web page to increase its rank is known as SEO or “search engine optimization”.
Currently search engine optimization is typically performed manually. Search engines carefully guard their rules and algorithms for determining rank, both against competitors and also to avoid “spam” web pages which do not provide useful content but which seek only to have a high ranking, for example to attract advertisers. However, manual analysis and adjustments are highly limited and may miss many important improvements to web pages that could raise their rank in search engine results.